No motors, gears or levers. 100% virtual physics and yet 100% real acoustics. It doesn’t make sense, but it works breathtakingly well. The catch? It isn’t cheap. Yet.

What do you get when you put $40,000 of computing horsepower into a $99 guitar?

The auto-tune guy that supposedly ‘destroyed’ music may be about to do the same to the guitar. Then again, Hendrix was into destroying guitars, but guitarists never seem to mind.

Want to start bending a string to a note, but you’re simply too tired or incompetent (or you’re playing something too complex or too fast) to bend it to the exact note you want, or in exactly the way you want to bend it?

Let the Antares ATG-6 help you perform on stage as if you bend strings ‘like a boss’: infallibly accurately, every twang and squeak.

If you want, you can set it so that you can’t accidentally ‘land’ half way between notes, and yet you can still make it sound absolutely natural (no ‘quantisation jumping’) or as deliberately unnatural as you like.

I could be wrong, but something tells me that this demo was not miked-up quite as well as it could be, so the audio quality doesn’t seem to be giving a very flattering impression.

For instance, the demo of the facility for ‘modelling different pickups’ only sounded particularly distinctive at the ‘bright’ end, many of the variations sounded very ‘samey’, which may be unrepresentative of what they will actually sound like in real life.

Instant capo, instant alternative tuning, instant bass, it isn’t and doesn’t sound like a guitar synthesiser, no latency, pedal operated real-time pitch analog-sounding shifting and (unbelievably?) it works also with slide.

This may turn out to be the best thing to ever happen (for the creative guitarist) as well as the worst thing to ever happen (to victims of the ‘conveyor belt’ side of the music production business) in the history of the guitar.

Personally, I’m still waiting for a USB plug-in device for my head, endowing me with instant Hendrix skills, so I won’t actually need anything but a $99 guitar. His showmanship also included playing an out-of-tune guitar and making it sound like it wasn’t: I wonder if this new technology works when you play it as he occasionally did on stage, with your teeth.

At $40,000 I would expect it to leave my teeth in a far better state than it found them, or my money back, no questions asked.